America Before the New Deal: How FDR's "Socialism" saved our nation.
©2010 Daniel A. Brown
Chances are most of you reading this have never heard of Lorena Hickock. Although she is known in the gay-lesbian community as Eleanor Roosevelt’s confident and rumored lover, her impact on American history was far broader than that titillating tidbit.
Hickock grew up in the Midwest, became a newspaper reporter and had a reputation for being both physically and emotionally expansive. In that curious 1920’s definition of Feminism, she could reputedly out-cuss and out-drink most of her male companions while playing a mean game of poker. Her rise in the world of journalism culminated in her reportage of Mrs. Roosevelt during the 1932 presidential campaign.
Whose husband entered the White House the following year and faced a nation slowing sinking to the nadir of the Great Depression. FDR had hundreds of ideas and an equal amount of experts but what he really needed was someone on the ground who could describe what the average American was up against on a daily basis. Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Relief Administration, charged Hickock with the task of traveling across the length and breadth of the United States, talking with people in all walks of life and, in too many cases, no walks at all. He didn’t need statistics or bureaucratic jargon. He wanted the straight truth, sent to him in weekly reports.
And so, Hickock loaded up her automobile nicknamed, “Bluette”, headed out on the road and gave him just that.
What she discovered was a rural America that resembled a dilapidated, impoverished Third World country with a population that was alternately terrified and apathetic about their dismal fate. The term “poverty” back then doesn’t depict current Americans who live below the poverty line but still have a car and a television. It referred to our ancestors who owned nothing more than the clothes on their backs and endured slow starvation. As her quest intensified, Hickock discovered that this level of misery was in place long before the Depression heightened its affect and brought it out into the light of day.
“Oh, the crushing drabness of life here”, Hickock reported from the Great Plains, “and the suffering of both people and animals. The people here are in a daze. A sort of nameless dread hangs over them. Half the people, farmers particularly, are scared to death”. The stark statistics gave them reason to be. In 1934, the per capita income of a typical American farmstead was $167. Families lived in hovels where the children’s’ shoeless feet were purple from cold. Only one home in ten had an indoor toilet and only one in five had electricity. Millions of rural Americans, afflicted with malnutrition, parasites, and deficiency diseases, had no hospital or even a public health nurse to turn to.
Not surprisingly, the most desperate conditions were found in both the American South and in Appalachia. In the first, she found people who were “half-starved” and “struggling in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home.” She met children and their parents who were not only completely illiterate but, in some cases, inarticulate as well. Sharecropping, which was the fate of nearly the entire African-American population in the South, reduced them to a level of servitude merely a fraction above slavery. Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, on his own journey of discovery, witnessed cotton states poverty “so abject” that European peasants were better off by comparison.
Conditions were no better in coal mining country where miners were forced to work for less than a dollar a day while living on a diet of flour, water, and lard that was “actually below domestic animal standards,” according to United Mine Workers president John Lewis. Like the sharecroppers, these miners existed in a semi-feudal environment, living in company-owned towns and chained in debt to company-owned stores. Starvation, disease and malnutrition were widespread. “It’s fairly common to see children entirely naked,” Hickock observed. “Dysentery is so common that nobody says much about it.” She added, however, that every year, babies so stricken routinely perished.
Hickock ultimately returned home and her combined reports added fuel for FDR’s eventual New Deal policies. Derided as “Socialism” by conservative critics, flawed and possibly unconstitutional at times, they nevertheless allowed the United States to begin its transformation from a demoralized and destitute nation to one that enjoyed the highest standard of living in human history a mere twelve years later.
A fact that is conveniently forgotten in some quarters today. But Hopkins’s advice to Hickock as she began her hegira still rings true and would be sound advice for all who pontificate about the state of the American people.
“Go talk with the preachers and teachers, businessmen, workers, and farmers,” he told her. “Go talk with the unemployed, those who are on relief and those who aren’t. And when you talk with them, don’t ever forget that but for the grace of God you, I, or any of our friends might be in their shoes”.
Hickock grew up in the Midwest, became a newspaper reporter and had a reputation for being both physically and emotionally expansive. In that curious 1920’s definition of Feminism, she could reputedly out-cuss and out-drink most of her male companions while playing a mean game of poker. Her rise in the world of journalism culminated in her reportage of Mrs. Roosevelt during the 1932 presidential campaign.
Whose husband entered the White House the following year and faced a nation slowing sinking to the nadir of the Great Depression. FDR had hundreds of ideas and an equal amount of experts but what he really needed was someone on the ground who could describe what the average American was up against on a daily basis. Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Relief Administration, charged Hickock with the task of traveling across the length and breadth of the United States, talking with people in all walks of life and, in too many cases, no walks at all. He didn’t need statistics or bureaucratic jargon. He wanted the straight truth, sent to him in weekly reports.
And so, Hickock loaded up her automobile nicknamed, “Bluette”, headed out on the road and gave him just that.
What she discovered was a rural America that resembled a dilapidated, impoverished Third World country with a population that was alternately terrified and apathetic about their dismal fate. The term “poverty” back then doesn’t depict current Americans who live below the poverty line but still have a car and a television. It referred to our ancestors who owned nothing more than the clothes on their backs and endured slow starvation. As her quest intensified, Hickock discovered that this level of misery was in place long before the Depression heightened its affect and brought it out into the light of day.
“Oh, the crushing drabness of life here”, Hickock reported from the Great Plains, “and the suffering of both people and animals. The people here are in a daze. A sort of nameless dread hangs over them. Half the people, farmers particularly, are scared to death”. The stark statistics gave them reason to be. In 1934, the per capita income of a typical American farmstead was $167. Families lived in hovels where the children’s’ shoeless feet were purple from cold. Only one home in ten had an indoor toilet and only one in five had electricity. Millions of rural Americans, afflicted with malnutrition, parasites, and deficiency diseases, had no hospital or even a public health nurse to turn to.
Not surprisingly, the most desperate conditions were found in both the American South and in Appalachia. In the first, she found people who were “half-starved” and “struggling in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home.” She met children and their parents who were not only completely illiterate but, in some cases, inarticulate as well. Sharecropping, which was the fate of nearly the entire African-American population in the South, reduced them to a level of servitude merely a fraction above slavery. Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, on his own journey of discovery, witnessed cotton states poverty “so abject” that European peasants were better off by comparison.
Conditions were no better in coal mining country where miners were forced to work for less than a dollar a day while living on a diet of flour, water, and lard that was “actually below domestic animal standards,” according to United Mine Workers president John Lewis. Like the sharecroppers, these miners existed in a semi-feudal environment, living in company-owned towns and chained in debt to company-owned stores. Starvation, disease and malnutrition were widespread. “It’s fairly common to see children entirely naked,” Hickock observed. “Dysentery is so common that nobody says much about it.” She added, however, that every year, babies so stricken routinely perished.
Hickock ultimately returned home and her combined reports added fuel for FDR’s eventual New Deal policies. Derided as “Socialism” by conservative critics, flawed and possibly unconstitutional at times, they nevertheless allowed the United States to begin its transformation from a demoralized and destitute nation to one that enjoyed the highest standard of living in human history a mere twelve years later.
A fact that is conveniently forgotten in some quarters today. But Hopkins’s advice to Hickock as she began her hegira still rings true and would be sound advice for all who pontificate about the state of the American people.
“Go talk with the preachers and teachers, businessmen, workers, and farmers,” he told her. “Go talk with the unemployed, those who are on relief and those who aren’t. And when you talk with them, don’t ever forget that but for the grace of God you, I, or any of our friends might be in their shoes”.
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